Desktop Sharing is a KDE service that allows you to share your desktop using the RFB protocol, better known as VNC. This new feature of KDE 3.1 allows a friend or administrator to fix problems on your computer, or you can use it to show your desktop to somebody else at a remote location. It is compatible with all regular VNC / RFB clients.

Thanks for the pointer to the "uninvited connections" checkbox. I missed it before when I was looking for a way to share my desktop for my access over the network. Now I'm serving up the VNC java applet with apache, so I can go to http://mycomputer/login from anywhere and get my desktop! Neat stuff.

I am also quite interested about this. VNC Desktop sharing is nice, but I am the only GNU/Linux box running KDE 3.1, and in fact, almost the only GNU/Linux workstation in the office! What would be amazing is for the e-mail invitations to give the choice: http based java applet, or local vnc client. As it is, I suppose I can always customize the e-mail invitation to specify the correct information (ie, point it to the Java applet on my computer) but, I still am not sure how to set it up...

hi!
For those who are still trying to prepare Desktop Sharing for distributed Networking on Java Platform, may be i could of some sort of help for them. Feel free to contact me, because i've created one, its a bit slow but it definitely works... and it can even manage more than one system Desktops simultaneously.

Hi man, I am also doing this project in JAVA. But I still don't know, how to send those frames from Server to Client in RMI. Like we've seen that it's easy to invoke a method on server via interface but How does the Server sends message to Client?

I too am a student and working on a project which involves Java code for Powerpoint Presentation Sharing between remote computer and Client computers(Almost similar to a Desktop Sharing). Can anyone fo u in the group hel me out?

Oh, and I almost forgot: I want to congratulate you on the attention to usability and user experience you are putting into KDE's desktop sharing programs. If only every KDE developer cared this much about usability issues! KDE would become so easy to use a three-year-old could do it :-)

The SWF format is open, and there is a free library called library called libflash. It should be able to play the movie. You may need to write a plugin first though. Concerning SVG, afaik there is no free implementation that is mature enough.

First, you can install /usr/ports/www/flashpluginwrapper that will allow you to view Flash with Macromedia's Linux plug-in within you natively compiled Mozilla. Works pretty sweet!

Secondly, you can install Netscape 7.0, which is a Linux based port. I haven't run this one myself, but in theory it should be able to properly embed any and all Linux based plug-ins in the ports tree.

Lastly, and most ickily (it's a living language. Deal with it), you can also install the Linux Netscape 4.7x. Ack, phewy. Still, the flash plug-in definitely works properly in it.

Heck, with the recent addition of KPlayer to the ports tree you can now even watch Quicktime movies within Konqueror. Took a little tweaking, but before too long I was watching movie preview right from Apple's web site.

Of course, with all these plug-ins that use Linux binaries that simply can't embed into natively compiled FreeBSD applications their's no good way to get everything working all in one browser just yet. Now if we could just get some more library wrappers like that flashpluginwrapper us FreeBSD folks would be stylin'!

No. I havent spent much time thinking about it, but I dont know an easy way to implement it... one of the problems is that the X11 server can only sent screen data that's currently visible. The only clean ways that I can think off all include writing a specialized X11 server, a X11 proxy or a X11 extension.

The X guys say it is a toolkit issue. They say that with the RandR extension, toolkits have all the information they need to migrate/duplicate a program between X displays. Maybe support should be added in QT? I guess that wouldn't be the best practical solution, though, since then only QT programs would be able to be shared; other apps would have to be re-written. And how would you tell a program to duplicate itself? Instead of having one program that could migrate others around, every program would have to migrate itself. An X extension would be better, but it doesn't sound like you'd have the support of major XFree developers.

RandR helps when you want to migrate an app from one X11 server to another (because it can reconfigure the parameters). But it does not help if you want to have the app on two X11 servers simultanously, or to get pixmap of the application's window (which is needed for VNC).

This is off-topic really, but would it be possible (in principal even:) to implement a sort of network/pass-through windows display driver. What I mean is, a driver where the calls into it are all passed down to the "real" display driver, and also sent off over the network. That way we could avoid all the screen scraping that VNC has to do?

You don't *have* to authorize twice. you could have krfb bind to only accept local connections, then someone ssh tunnels to the box and it just works. Then using the invitation cookies it would keep out other local users from nabing your session.

If the VNC server does not require a password, everybody with an account on the machine would be able to join every desktop.

To solve this you would need some challenge-response technique (for example krfb writes cookie to user's home dir, krdc reads it over ssh and uses the cookie as password). But then the solution becomes more complicated than SSL and not backward compatible with existing vnc servers anymore - thus the only two advantages of ssh would be lost.